Radical Rim Light

Recently while in Florida, I saw a couple of beautiful photos by Orlando Camera Club member Wallace Weeks where only the rim of an object was lit. Wallace, who is very generous with sharing knowledge, explained how he accomplished this, so I decided to try it for myself. The technique involves using a light source such as a softbox, covering about 2/3 rds of it with a flag (I used black) and shooting your subject into the light. In other words, your subject is directly between you and the light source. It is sort of like shooting into the sun! What results after some experimentation, is your subject with only the rim lit. As you can see from the image, I have captured some colour in the glass. The subject must be reflective but not necessarily transparent. It does require a bit of work in Photoshop to remove the odd specular highlight.